"Go on, Emily!"
George gave her a poke. "Sneak up and pull his pigtail."

From her hiding place
behind the hedge in front of George's house, Emily watched the peddler
jog-trotting along the muddy street. He was a familiar sight, dressed
in dark, baggy trousers, a loose-fitting jacket, and a wide-brimmed
hat. And like the other Chinese men, he wore his hair in a long pigtail.

"He's not going
to bite you," Alice said. "George pulled a peddler's pigtail
yesterday. Tom and I did too."

"We dare you,"
George went on. "If you're not too much of a scaredy-cat."

Emily frowned. She
didn't want to do it. If Hing found out, he wouldn't like it one bit.
Still, she didn't take dares lightly.

Emily was
certain she would get a bicycle for Christmas. In Victoria, BC, in 1896,
they were all the rage for the young, and after all, her father worked
in a bank, they had a house in James Bay, and a Chinese servant. The
bicycle does not materialize, however, either at Christmas or at her
birthday which falls soon after. This theme of financial difficulties
resulting from the depression in 1893 parallels that of racial prejudice
against the Chinese who came to help build the railway and then stayed
on mostly as domestic help for the British.

Hing,
Emily's family's cook, has worked for ten years since the imposition
of the head tax on Chinese immigrants, but he still has not enough money
to pay the fifty dollars required to bring each of his wife and three
children from China. Emily, on the receiving end of much of Hing's kindness,
thinks perhaps her father could be persuaded to pay the tax for Hing,
but she never even asks. She realized when her father was prepared to
dismiss Hing summarily because of a vase that she, in fact, had broken
that he regarded Hing merely as a replaceable convenience, not as a
member of the family as Emily does. Her father is, however, a fair man,
and when Emily has fetched Hing from Chinatown and confessed that the
vase was her fault, Hing is reinstated.

Julie
Lawson has created a powerful atmosphere in this book. The overt, and
covert, anti-Chinese sentiment, the uneasy financial situation, the
gradually emerging freedom for children, especially girls, are all here
without lengthy explanations or even direct statements. The storyline
is slight, as might be anticipated from an attempt to be strictly factual,
and the excitements are low-key. Parties, excursions, dares are not
such as to keep the reader on the edge of her chair, and, not having
a major conflict in the plot, there is no major resolution either. Emily
is an appealing character who has the moral courage to admit her fault
rather than have someone else suffer for it. One can be gently pleased
that she could give "a little skip, realizing how lucky she was
that her father was not off in some distant land [as Hing was
for his children]. He was just around the corner, waiting for her to
come home."

It
is surprising that the illustrator is not named. The cover art is by
Janet Wilson, and I assume, the black-and-white illustrations are as
well. They certainly are a positive aspect of the book and should be
acknowledged.

Emily
lacks the excitement that would make it a child's first choice, but
it is well written and illuminates a period of Canadian history of which
most of us are completely ignorant. Also, it is written at a level that
new readers, wanting to expand into chapter books, should be able to
read by themselves.